When Your Best Friend Dies, A Part of You Dies With Them
From the Desk of RD
The Reality of Grief – When Your Best Friend Dies, A Part of You Dies With Them
For those fortunate enough to marry their best friend—someone who’s more than just a husband—my words will resonate deeply. Marriage is one of the most complex relationships. It often starts with love and promise, but over time, the pressures of life—children, careers, financial worries, family drama—can cause couples to drift apart. However, if your relationship was rooted in a strong friendship from the beginning, that bond can help you weather even the most challenging storms. That’s how it was for Gill and me—an unlikely, eccentric couple who had seemingly nothing in common but shared a profound, unspoken love as best friends.
Gill and I were true buddies. We knew each other’s pasts, and it never bothered us. There was no jealousy or insecurity because we were beyond the petty games of dishonesty or disloyalty. We had both been through heartache—breakups, divorce, and, in Gill’s case, losing his first wife to cancer at a young age. Our shared experiences made our bond even stronger.
Now, since he’s passed, I feel like he took a part of me with him. Our friendship was so deep that his absence has left an unfillable void. I look at my phone and remember how I would pester him with calls, sometimes 20 times a day, just to chat. He never minded. We’d pass the time during traffic jams, debating about which butcher shop to buy our meat from or which tomatoes to use for his favorite ginger chicken. I miss those silly arguments over trivial things. I miss kicking his shoes out of the way in the hallway, knowing he left them there just to annoy me. I miss asking him which coffee he wanted, only for him to mock my fancy espresso choices. I miss him sitting in the living room, sorting laundry with me, teasing about my medium-sized clothes compared to my old small sizes, reminding me I wasn’t the spring chicken I used to be. I miss him telling me to get my eyebrows threaded before I started looking like our pet dog. His little annoyances were just his way of showering love, and now I see how much I took them for granted.
We used to joke about who would die first, never imagining this day would come so suddenly and unexpectedly. Losing a spouse is always painful, but when that spouse is also your best friend, the heartbreak is unimaginable.
I miss you Gill, so so much!
#missingyoubaldi #griefjourney #mygrief #losingyourbuddy #losingyourfriend
